Friday, December 20, 2013

Earlier this week I spent 2 hours with a group of high school students that were selected to be part of the "President of Israel program to discover and cultivate the inventors and scientists of the future". The IBM Haifa Research Lab took part in this program, by conducting a sequence of sessions, each with one of our local scientists (I was the last in the sequence).

It was a very interactive session, and as part of it I described four scenarios of event processing in different areas (typical examples I am using in my talks: the car theft example, the intensive care unit scenario, the never-lost luggage scenario, and the cold chain scenario that we use in our recent TEM video clip. I have asked them what they think is the common denominator among all these scenarios -- they said many right things, but one kid said the most important thing: "in these scenarios the roles are reversed, instead of the usual way that the person tells a computer what to do, here the computer tells a person what to do".This kid will definitely have a bright future...

It mentions two interesting observations: One is that the confusion in the market about the term "big data" and its tangible results constrain the spending and limit the growth of BI and analytics software. The second observation is that By 2017, more than 50 percent of analytics implementations will make use of event data streams generated from instrumented instrumented machines, applications and/or individuals.

This is consistent with the Gartner's term - "two tier analytics", where event processing is the second tier, after historical data analytics. While the need to consolidate analytics and event processing is becoming more pervasive, the utilization barrier and the need to battle complexity is still a common denominator.